Wright Chat

Good for Jeff! LA lost a lot when Jeff Chusid moved on to the University of Texas. And now he has moved on to Cornell, the university I would have attended, but for money. Jeff's book on Freeman is a must-have for any FLW library. My only complaint is that many of the images of drawings are so small...

Don't forget crayons.

SDR, concerning the living room rug: In Chusid's book, pages 152 to 167, there are several photos of the living room, both without and with the carpet. Photos before 1953 show a bare floor. One photo, dated 1950, has a store-bought couch where the east couch ended up ... no carpet. Another shows the...

The structural system at La Min differs significantly from Storer-Freeman-Ennis-Little Dipper, in that the blocks were "male-female" back to back, with only straps of metal placed every third horizontal row. This is obviously why it had fewer structural problems than the others: less steel...

Don't shoot the messanger.

To assert that Mahoney had much of anything to do with the design of Robie is ridiculous on the face of it. A glance at the work she did that is indisputably her own shows she lacked the ability to produce such a work. H. Allen Brooks, a better historian than Alofsin, avers that Mahoney designed Ado...

SDR, I have a complete set of working drawings of Freeman. The lamps appear there as well as in Storer. Although Storer was designed before Freeman, there were overlaps during construction. Which one ended up with the lamps first will probably not be revealed until the Rapture. During his tenure at ...

Perhaps the risers were added to comply with code restrictions. The gap between treads is 4.625". Four inches is commonly the maximum.

Matt2, Harriett willed the house to USC along with several hundred thousand dollars to restore it. USC spent quite a lot of money (nowhere near $4M) to stabilize the structure after the '94 quake.

Rather than getting bogged down with precise definitions, each parcel has to be assessed for its own situation. True restoration, whether for public or private use, is the most difficult; it places restrictions on the property that conservation and preservation don't. Polymath Park seems like a good...

The lower level lounge did have glass at the west end. However, RMS remodeled that space considerably once Sam and Harriett had divorced, but would neither of them agree to leave the house. The bedroom level became Harriett's bedroom on the east, a division setting the bulk of the lounge off, plus t...

SDR, the lights shown from Ennis are not simply the Freeman metal-framed cubes hung from a corner. The Ennis lights were made of wood with a simplified pattern relating to the blocks. They were to be hung in the 100'-long loggia. For whatever reason, small, bronze Aladdin lamps (or gravy boats, as I...

The Freeman pews are more dressing for the living room-cum dance stage than for "lounging by the fire," a pastime not all that popular in hot LA. Notice that the fireplace, even in late photos, shows little evidence of use. While the Schindler couches look better, the west one, which slid ...

The Healdsburg site is indeed serene. The house? Not so much.

It's time to call upon our master, tech-savvy renderers to take on a thorough examination of Freeman. The video is interesting and informative, but a bit too simplistic to serve as a record of this major masterpiece. It gets all the spaces and general details correct, except the roof over the garage...